It only feels like yesterday that I was looking forward to Maya 2018, but here we are 494 days since the last major release and I’m just as excited.
Autodesk has responded to customer requests by doing a lot of work under the hood, so where this latest release won’t be showing off major new features it’s had plenty of
bugs fixed and become faster and more stable.
There’s now an option to use Arnold in Viewport 2.0, which will help artists tweaking their scene ready for the final output.
Animators will benefit from the new Cached Playback as well as new Graph Editor filters and Motion Capture samples.
Launching Maya files has seen a significant speed increase, even with scenes including MetaData. Viewport selection is quicker, as are material and texture load times. All these under the hood fixes are geared toward making Maya faster and more efficient to use.
Arch-Viz users will definitely see the benefit of built-in options for RenderPeople presets through the content browser. And there are some new render setup features and even a video series to help you understand them (available here).
A full list of release details can be found on Autodesk's website, and Maya 2019 is available to download now via your Autodesk account. Or contact our Head of Software, Graeme, to get a new copy.